


Tartarus Calling

by kaitain



Category: Dune - All Media Types, Dune Series - Frank Herbert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-02
Updated: 2013-04-02
Packaged: 2017-12-07 07:44:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/746035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaitain/pseuds/kaitain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone he has ever known has always been falling. He is no exception.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tartarus Calling

There had been hydrangeas in the garden where his mother died.

Piter remembers it well, just as well as he remembers four standard years, three months, and sixteen days ago— he remembers a great many things very clearly, but not all of them are of any import. Precisely three months ago at half past midnight, the Baron had belched.  Piter recalls a wealth of inconsequential moments on Giedi Prime, and as he gently purges them from his memory, they blur into vague hatred for the man that shackles him like a kept animal. In another week, he will learn to forget and reforge those things— but he will never forget the way his mother's green dress rippled around her like seafoam in the grass of the courtyard.

Lying to himself is of no use, and so he does not try to convince himself that there is nothing significant about that woman's twisted corpse. He remembers little about her other than her death, but he knows that he resembles her— a concubine, a kept creature just as her son the Mentat would grow to be.

Her fall to the depths had happened almost before his young mind could analyze it— one moment he had been sitting in the grass, plucking at it, curled into himself and watching a captive breeze move through the leaves above him, and the next she had tipped over the edge of the balcony without so much as a scream— resigned, it seemed, to her fate.

She had fallen like a sack for three stories, he remembers, and landed with a crunch.

One of the other concubines, some clucking, insufferable hen, had run squawking into the courtyard and dragged him away; now, more than forty years later, he has recognized the horror in her eyes reborn in countless other pairs of teary, bloodshot, fear-stricken mirrors, but he still cannot quite understand it— just as she didn't understand why the little newly-orphaned boy would not cry.

He has never felt that same kind of horror, even with hands wrapped around his throat or threats quite literally spat into his face; he has always been cold. He prefers things to be that way— a Mentat should not be crippled by emotion. Mentat he has always been, even at the age of five, staring impassively at his mother's corpse and thinking, matter-of-factly, _She is dead._ There had been no blood, only her obscenely twisted neck and the astonished expression on her face. Piter later came to learn that it was the precise expression a living person would make when the wind was knocked out of them. His mother's corpse taught him many things in the brief few moments he had stood beside it.

It has never been clear to him who it was that had him cast out from the palace over the course of the next year, but he believes that it must have been his father.

Being a bastard child has never weighed upon him, but the stolen chance at the helm of that palace is what chafes him so terribly when he dwells on it for too long. Heir or not— likely not, he is sure— he believes that he could have wrested that power out of the old patriarch's hands, and yet his own wretched pater's insolence is what ruined him.

All the same, he does not hate the man. The concept of him brings about a crude yet suppressible acrimony, but hatred would be worthless. Hatred takes too much of his energy; there could be no satisfaction in hating him, no possibility for vengeance, no way to even find him if he is indeed still living.

There are men within his reach that have earned his hatred.

A part of him knows that his anger will always be useless and crippling, that he will always be more man than Mentat, but the rest of him is consoled by the idea of his fingers tight around the Duke Leto's throat, or the throat of his woman. That such a fool could have such power offends Piter to the core— worse would be Rabban and his power, and while it is affronting, it is a mockery on all fronts; the oaf still doesn't know, will never know what a pawn he is. Leto's power is real, his reach pervading, and Piter despises him for it. 

His greatest goal, now, is to see that Leto falls. Since the conception of that exquisitely treacherous plan, Leto's back has been to the golden rail of a third-story balcony— and now he is being pushed, pushed, pushed ever-backward and over the edge.

Piter could reach out for him— anyone could. But neither he nor anyone else will, for they are swathed in ignorance and he in malice. If his hands close around the Duke's for even a moment, it will only be to feel the power slipping between them, mingling between clutching fingers, moving up his arms and through his muscles and into his heart, where it belongs. Leto's heart is too weak; it has tried to harden and only succumbed to love, but Piter does not think himself so stupid.

The Lady Jessica is beautiful, but he does not want her for her beauty or the foolish notion of companionship. He would not even try to sire an heir on her— could not, if the trickery of the Gesserit sisters is taken into account— but he thinks that, instead, when she dies beneath his blade he will kiss the last wound to steal life from her, and with her blood on his lips and on his fingertips, he will go to Leto and he will see that he kneels.

It isn't that he feels any measure of sadness about the powerlessness that characterizes his life, but there is a great bitterness in him like so much bile in his throat that makes him hot with anger. It makes his fingers tremble, but he stills them when the Baron draws near; that man already knows too much of his weaknesses, knows all too well how to sink his teeth into them like he does to a fine cut of meat. Piter hates him. Piter has never hated any man or maiden so deeply before. Even the spiteful, acrid feelings that roil in his heart for the Duke cannot compare to the ire that consumes him when he hears the booming call of "my dear Piter" bouncing off stone walls.

Even when he is alone, he cannot feel as though he has escaped the man's rancid breath in his face or those thick fingers gripping at his wrists, demanding that he stay, demanding that he fall silent, demanding that his mind works faster, demanding, demeaning, degrading. His blood, his eyes, his every breath will always be tainted by the spice that man fed him, and he knows that it worsens with every passing second.

He does not fantasize about forcing the Baron or his nephews to bow to him. He only hopes that their fall will be harsher than his, and his mother's, and Leto's as well.

Here, he cannot lie to himself. He knows that he has always been destined for descent.

**Author's Note:**

> in one of frank herbert's deleted scenes from dune, piter emotionlessly regales the baron with the story of his mother's death and relates it to the fall of leto. i will never, ever get over the fact that this wasn't actually in the book.
> 
> like, ever.
> 
> this as a piece is kind of rambly and not very good and the ending is rather abrupt what is quality writing i have no idea leave me here to die i have so many emotions about piter even though he's a horrible piece of crap


End file.
